Collaboration and Ethics: Leading Together with Heart, Hustle, and Humility

“Collaboration is the opposite of control.”

After 20 years in the social sector, across programmes, partnerships, and strategy, one realisation stands out: meaningful collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through showing up consistently. Real collaboration isn’t about power plays or polished optics. It’s about making space for others. It needs intention and structure. It needs care.

Collaboration rooted in feminist values means leading with care, trust, equity, and shared power. It’s about recognising lived experiences, agreeing to disagree, and letting go of ego, over and overagain.

Over the past year at EMpower, this belief has come alive across continents and communities. From Mumbai to Istanbul, Udaipur to Sri Lanka, youth leaders stepped forward with conviction, clarity and purpose. Our partners supported one another across cultures. And our teams embraced discomfort to co-create something none of us could have done alone.

In February 2025, we brought this spirit into action through a two-and-a-half-day learning exchange in Mumbai. Our Turkish partner Suna’s Daughters and their three partner organisations joined six grassroots organisations from Maharashtra. Thirty-five participants came together to explore girl-centred design—its meaning, its challenges, and its promise. The thread that ran through every session was a single question: How do we centre girls in decisions, design, and delivery?

One Turkish participant, after hearing about one of our Mumbai-based partners, Vacha’s community media work, said something that stayed with me: “Meeting girls from another country made me realise our struggles are similar—and our strength is too.” Later, during the learning exchange visit to Turkey in April 2025, Roshni, one of our Girls Advisory Council members, reflected: “My being here—and the presence of my fellow youth from the Suna team—matters. My voice, my presence, my thoughts—they’re part of this. That’s what makes it meaningful.”

We saw this again with Youth Ke Bol (YKB), a youth-led coalition EMpower supported in its final year, initially incubated by Dasra. With over one million young people advocating for stronger Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) services in Tier 2 and 3 cities, YKB has become a vibrant, youth-driven movement. At the March 2025 Conclave, over 180 young changemakers, CSOs, funders, and influencers joined hands to reflect and recommit. Youth didn’t just participate—they designed the sessions, led the conversations, and shaped the event.

Another example that reminds us what’s possible is our work with Saath, one of our 10-year sunset partners, which shows what collaboration can achieve. Through collective learning with peers, Saath created a youth entrepreneurship model that continues to thrive beyond our formal engagement. A collaboration that sustains itself without fostering dependency.

While we focus on collaboration, we need to remember that ethics is the silent backbone. Any collaboration without ethics quickly turns into extraction. An ethical collaboration will help build cultures that reflect dignity, accountability, and respect. To centre ethics, we must continually ask ourselves:

• Are we truly listening, or simply consulting?
• Are we building capacity, or outsourcing risk?
• Are we acknowledging contributions, or quietly claiming credit?

Lessons We’re Carrying Forward

1. Trust takes time. Humility is the practice. You can’t rush deep collaboration.
2. Ethics needs a budget. Plan for inclusion, translation, and accessibility from the start.
3. Credit is a form of currency. Name the invisible labour. Honour it publicly and often.
4. Power-sharing is non-negotiable. Especially when working in and for marginalised communities.
5. Stay uncomfortable. Ethical collaboration means questioning hierarchies—and that’s never easy.

You cannot build a just future if you’re not willing to share the present.

These moments reminded us that empathy and shared learning travel across borders—but so does complexity. The sector is shifting. Participatory grant making, feminist philanthropy, and power-aware practices are no longer fringe. They’re becoming the norm. However, living those values day-to-day is challenging. It demands time, patience, and a genuine willingness to share space and let go of control. It means choosing depth over speed, integrity over performance.

At EMpower, we don’t see young people as passive beneficiaries. They are the reason, the compass, and the co-creators of everything we do. Their insight, leadership, and lived experience are shaping our work—bottom up.

We acknowledge that there’s no perfect model. We cannot solve intergenerational challenges with siloed or inherited approaches. For genuine collective impact, we must be willing to share space, knowledge, and leadership, regardless of our generation. Complex cultural and social norms require unlearning inherited hierarchies and assumptions, iteration, and shared responsibility.

That’s the work we’re here for:
To centre youth.
To honour ethics.
And to lead with heart, hustle, and humility.